1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to smart appliances capable of wireless network connection, and more particularly, to a configuration method and system for using a portable electronic product to configure the smart appliances for connection with a wireless network, thereby having advantages, such as ease of use and quick configuration.
2. Description of Related Art
Due to a surge of networking applications, electrical appliances used at home, such as air conditioners, refrigerators, and shower heaters, are increasingly capable of network connection which can be coupled with cloud computing to turn the home appliances into smart appliances easy to operate and potential to energy saving. Hence, there is presently a fast-growing market of smart appliances.
In general, home appliances are equipped mostly with a small-sized display unit or do not even have one. Alternatively, home appliances are installed at a place where users find it difficult o operate the home appliances by hand. As a result, it is inconvenient for the users to perform complicated network configuration of smart appliances. In view of the drawback of the prior art, US2013/0039352 discloses a wireless network configuration method for use with smart appliances, wherein, before it has been connected to a wireless network, an Internet-accessible device is configured to operate in an access point mode (AP mode, or infrastructure mode) so as for a portable electronic device to connect, by a point-to-point connection, to the Internet-accessible device to be configured, such that a user can control wireless network configuration operation carried out with the Internet-accessible device, using a display unit and an operation interface of the portable electronic device.
However, the network configuration operation requires the user to manually key in a service set identifier (SSID) of an intended wireless network and thereby results in inconvenience of operating. Furthermore, after finishing the configuration operation and thus connecting the Internet-accessible device to the wireless network, the user can switch the Internet-accessible device to a client mode in which the portable electronic device is prevented from searching for the Internet-accessible device by scanning existing wireless networks so as to preclude overly complicated visual presentation on the display unit of the portable electronic device. However, doing so comes with a disadvantage, i.e., it is unable to connect the portable electronic device to the Internet-accessible device directly; instead, the portable electronic device is connected to the Internet-accessible device via a wireless network, thereby bringing inconvenience in remote control operation.
In the situation where a user has many smart appliances (ie, the Internet-accessible device) each connected to a household wireless network, if the SSID of the household wireless network is changed by the user or the connection to the household wireless network is interrupted, the smart appliances will switch to the AP mode, and in consequence the user will have to perform wireless network configuration of the smart appliances one by one from the portable electronic device and will cause much more inconveniently.